Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 505

40 years late, jerk face.

Have you heard?

It wasn’t Yoko’s fault after all.

From The Daily Beast: 

Paul McCartney absolves John Lennon’s widow of any blame in the break up of the Beatles in a new interview with David Frost. “She certainly didn’t break the group up. The group was breaking up,” the famed singer and songwriter says in the hour long special to debut next month.

Why the hell did it take Paul McCartney 42 years to let Yoko Ono off the hook? He sat by for more than four decades, listening to Beatles fans blame Yoko Ono for the breakup of the band, and only now does he decide to come forward and absolve her of blame?

What a jerk.

That is not a chicken, damn it.

In order from right to left, my daughter identified these cardboard cutouts as a ballerina, bones (not bad), a baseball player (close enough for a toddler), a witch and a chicken.

 

That is not a chicken. That is not even close to a chicken.

I told her, but she didn’t buy it. I added it to my “I told you so” calendar.

Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness

Imagine:

You launch a podcast in order to share your passion about books and story with the world. You dedicate your time, money and expertise to the cause.

In return, you expect nothing. In fact, you actively reject opportunities to profit from your enterprise.

As a result of your time and effort, a community of like-minded people is born. It is an extraordinary group of extraordinary people, but it is a group that would have never come together without your efforts. Lifelong friendships flourish. Bicoastal bonds are born. Introverts like those who Susan Cain spoke about in her now-famous TED Talk are given pathways to meeting new people who share their same passion and values. Stories are shared. Books are passed from hungry reader to hungry reader.

It’s a real community that did not exist and then did.

It’s an amazing story. Honestly. 

But you are not finished. Not even close.

You decide to bring the community together in real life. You plan a weekend. You assemble a group of authors. You assemble a group of readers from the community. You most assuredly lose money in the process, but in the process, magic happens.

Authors meet authors, and lifelong friendships are established.

Readers meet readers, and lifelong friendships are established.

Readers meet authors, authors meet readers, and they discover that they are all simply book lovers at heart.

For some, it is the best three days of their year.

Magic.

And you do all this without an eye towards profit or growth or income or fame. You do this simply because you want to spend time meeting people in the community that you have helped to create. You do this because you care about the people in that community.

But you are not finished. Not even close.

The following year you bring the community together again. Not just once but three times, to locations stretching from coast to coast, insisting every step of the way to make these retreats unconscionably affordable even though members of the still-growing community would pay three or four or five times your fee in order to attend and consider it a bargain.

But you prefer to keep the cost low, your stress level high and your workload almost unmanageable because you insist on placing every member of the community ahead of yourself.

Once again friendships are born. Relationships are strengthened. Readers and authors come together in conversation around their mutual love of books.

Magic.

Next year you’ll do it again. The stress and workload will remain the same, but you don’t care. It’s what you do. 

Most astounding of all, you think this is normal. You think that anyone would have done it this way, this how. You don’t think that what you’ve done is terribly special. You think it’s the members of the community who make this special, and while this may be true, you fail to realize that you are the single most important members of the community.

All of this would never have happened without you.

You have done something great. Something amazing. Something rarely done before. 

But you don’t have time to listen to such nonsense. There is a new podcast to record. A new retreat to plan. A new book to read. A new story to recommend.

The people who I have described exist. They are Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness, hosts of Books of the Nightstand, a weekly podcast about books. But after reading this, I hope that I have made it clear that their hosting duties are just a tiny part of what they do.

I have spent the last five years publishing books. In that time, my life has grown and changed in ways that I could have never imagined. The blessings that my novels have brought to my life are incalculable.

I rate Ann and Michael’s friendship and my membership in the Books on the Nightstand community among the very best of these blessings.

If you love books, do yourself a favor:

Give their podcast a listen. Become a member of the community. Join us for a retreat. Meet Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness, the two people who have made all this possible.

Five months old today!

My wife made the hat.

We made Charlie.

This may not make her the coolest kid in high school

My three year old daughter specifically requested the song Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini while in the car yesterday.

Earlier in the week, when the song Dancing in the Moonlight came on the radio, she raised her fist into the air and shouted, “King Harvest!” followed by “Is he really a king, Mom?”

This kid is developing a seriously eclectic taste in music.

Bad Internet

The Internet is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without it.

Still, I can’t help but think that before the Internet, this sentence, and sentences like it, never existed:

Need. Coffee. Now.

There’s something to be said for the old days.

Some of my favorite things

A spiteful Santa, a bratty boy, a dinosaur and poop?

I’m not going to lie. This book sounds great.

The Nipple Bra is further proof that it wasn’t entirely my parents’ fault.

I once heard a Moth storyteller blame her parents’ failure to meet the minimum requirements of a mother and father on the 1970s. It was a different and inexplicable time in the history of the country, the storyteller explained. A strange and mysterious decade that no one today can quite understand.

A time when the inexplicable became explicable.

I took great comfort in this idea. Having been born in 1971, perhaps this is why my parents failed me in so many ways as well. I quickly latched onto the notion and have been clinging to it ever since.

Since then, I have been watchful for further signs that the 1970s were an anomaly in the history of this country. Anything to bolster the claim that it wasn’t my parents who failed me. It was the decade.

The 1970s were to blame.

The Nipple Bra is one of these signs. An obvious indicator that the people living in the 1970s had completely, albeit temporarily, lost their minds.  

A dog ate my book.

MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND had an interesting week.

Early in the week, I was contacted by a reader who had borrowed a signed copy of the book from a friend under the condition that it be returned in perfect condition.

A few days later her dog ate the book, necessitating an emergency phone call to the author in order to acquire another signed copy.

My first canine fan.

Last night the San Francisco Giants defeated the Detroit Tigers in the World Series, which means that one of my fans will be handing over a signed copy of the book over to a San Francisco fan in order to settle a bet between the two of them.

The first time my book has ever been included in sports wager, at least to my knowledge.

Today the book was mentioned in Shelf Awareness after having been named one of Hudson Books Best Books of 2012.

It was an incredible honor to have my book included on this prestigious list, but I think I got slightly more joy out of the dog eating my book.

I’ve always been a dog person.

Overstated

My daughter, a possible future geologist, handed me a rock today and told me it was “the shiniest rock in the whole wide world.”

It wasn’t. Not even close.